The Alpha's Hidden Debts

Chapter 37: What Riven Decides

Sera's Pov

I did not go to the meeting.

I was not invited, which was not the same as being excluded. I understood the difference. A senior pack meeting was pack business, the inner circle of Northesk, and I was not that, not formally, not yet. So I did what I had always done when decisions were being made in rooms I was not in.

I stayed close and I listened.

The meeting room was down the hall from the records room. Old wood, heavy door, the kind of walls that were thick enough to muffle most words but not all of them. I sat in the records room with my door slightly open and I did not pretend I was not doing it.

I heard Riven's voice first, low and even, the meeting-tone that was different from his regular voice the way a river was different when it went narrow, same water, more force. He laid everything out. I could not hear every word, but I heard enough. The Vaels. The bloodline. The extraction attempt. The detained team. All of it, and from what I could piece together, none of it softened.

Then a silence. Riven asking if anyone had something to say.

Nothing. The silence of a room full of people who had been given enough information to have made up their minds before they were asked.

Then Dex's voice, lighter than the rest, recognizable even through the wall.

"I have a question."

A pause.

"Are we doing this because she's strategically useful? Or because it's right?"

I stopped breathing.

Riven's answer came without hesitation, the same way he answered everything that he had already decided.

"Both. If either reason alone isn't enough for you, the two together should be."

I let out the breath slowly. I looked at the ledger open on the table in front of me and understood, for the first time in a long time, that I was not going to be able to make myself read another line of it tonight.

The meeting broke up twenty minutes later. I heard feet in the hallway, voices moving toward the main part of the lodge. Gideon's voice among them, which still caught me slightly off guard even now, the shape of it belonging to a different chapter of my life.

I waited until the hallway went quiet. Then I went to find Riven.

He was in his study, standing at the window with a mug of something in his hand, looking out at the compound in the dark. He had not sat down yet, which told me his body was still moving faster than the rest of the evening had let it.

He heard me come in and turned, just his head at first.

"You listened," he said.

"Yes," I said. I did not apologize for it.

Something at the corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile. He turned back to the window.

"I heard what you said," I told him. "In the meeting."

"Which part."

"The both part." I came further into the room, stopping near the edge of his desk. "You didn't have to frame it that way. You could have just said it was right and let that be enough."

He shrugged, one shoulder, unhurried. "It's also strategic. Might as well be honest about both things."

"Dex asked because he wanted to know your actual reason," I said.

"I know. I gave it to him." He turned from the window fully and looked at me. "Was there something else?"

I had been thinking about it since the training yard. Since the moment I had grabbed his arm and known, completely and without any room for doubt, that something was about to happen before it happened. The ability had saved lives tonight. It had done that as it was, raw and untrained, arriving when it wanted to and going quiet when it wanted to.

I wanted to know what it could do if I actually worked at it.

"I want to start training," I said. "Whatever this ability is, whatever I have. I want to develop it properly." I held his gaze. "I'm not going to be a passenger in my own story."

Riven looked at me for a long moment. Not like the request surprised him. More like he had been expecting it and was pleased that it had arrived in exactly these words.

"First thing tomorrow," he said.

"Okay." I nodded once. "Thank you."

He shook his head slightly. "Don't thank me. It's yours already. We're just going to figure out what it is."

I left him there at the window and went back toward my room, feeling something sitting differently in my chest than it had an hour ago, a kind of forward weight, like the difference between bracing for something and moving toward it.

I had almost reached the stairs when Riven's voice came from down the hall, changed, the easy matter-of-fact tone gone and something harder underneath it.

"Sera."

I turned back.

He was standing in the doorway of his study, his phone in his hand, screen lit, his jaw tight in the way it went when something required his full attention and most of his patience simultaneously.

"The council sent a message," he said. He held up the phone slightly. "Formal inquiry. They're calling the three we detained tonight private security personnel." His voice was very controlled. "They want them released."

He looked at me over the top of the screen. In his eyes was the particular kind of calm that was not calm at all but had decided to look like it while something worked hard underneath.

The people who had come to take me tonight were now being protected by the same council that was supposed to keep wolves safe.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

Riven looked back at the screen. "I'm going to need a very good lawyer and a very long night," he said. "And tomorrow morning we are still training."